Workday shares slide following claims Amazon ditched company-wide HR system
- Reference: 1627474383
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/07/28/amazon_canned_workday_project/
- Source link:
A deal between the megacorp and Workday, an enterprise application interloper, [1]was signed in 2017 with Amazon HR veep Beth Galetti at the time declaring: "Workday is an HR cloud leader that provides an innovative, customer-focused HCM system that will support Amazon as we continue to hire employees around the world."
Three years later, the Seattle book-seller-cum-enterprise-juggernaut has changed its tune. [2]According to reports , a migration from Oracle's PeopleSoft has come unstuck because Workday's database, an in-memory system that drew inspiration from SAP's HANA, did not scale to the needs of Amazon's increasing number of employees. In 2017, around 300,000 worked for the firm worldwide. Now it is around 800,000 in the US and [3]1.3 million worldwide .
[4]
Reports claim that some Amazon businesses, like streaming platform Twitch, are using Workday's HR system, but for the main part, the organisation still relies on Oracle's PeopleSoft.
[5]Financial Ombudsman Service to ditch tech heads as it open arms to Workday and outside service provider
[6]Back to the office: Workday hiring 20% more Workdayers in anticipation of postponed projects opening up
[7]State of Maine lays off 15 independent consultants on $13k a month amid efforts to implement troubled Workday system
[8]State of Maine says Workday has shown 'no accountability' for farcical $56.4m HR upgrade
In [9]a blogpost , Workday said it and Amazon had both "mutually agreed to discontinue Amazon's Workday Human Capital Management deployment," based on a decision taken "more than a year and a half ago."
It said there was "the potential to revisit [the project] in the future" and denied the decision was "related to the scalability of the Workday system." One of its largest retail customers supported 1.5 million workers worldwide, it said.
[10]
[11]
"At times… customers have a unique set of needs that are different from what we're delivering for our broader customer base, as was the case with Amazon – one of the most unique and dynamic companies in the world," the statement said.
The Register has approached Amazon for comment.
[12]
Workday's shares slid by as much as 7.8 per cent when news of Amazon's decision broke.
It is not only megacorps that seem to struggle to implement Workday software. In the last year, two North American public-sector projects have become mired in difficulties.
The State of Maine [13]ordered an official review of its $54.6m project to renew its HR system based on software from Workday, accusing the vendor of showing [14]"no accountability" for its part in a flawed project which could leave the state government continuing to rely on its 30-year-old mainframe-based system.
[15]
At the time, Workday told The Register it was "committed to partnering with the State of Maine to successfully complete this project."
Meanwhile, teaching assistants at Canada's McGill University spent Christmas waiting to be paid as the [16]institution struggled with a new Workday HR and payroll system , according to the Association of Graduate Students Employed at McGill (AGSEM). ®
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[1] https://www.workday.com/en-us/company/latest/newsroom/press-releases/press-release-details.html?id=2137118
[2] https://timesnewsexpress.com/news/finance/banking/exclusive-amazons-companywide-deal-to-use-workdays-hr-software-ended-after-about-3-years/
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/21/amazon_aws_recruitment/
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/saas&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YQF-E4S4iJ2ZVLZAlfADkQAAAMM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/22/financial_ombudsman_service_looks_to/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/27/workday_sees_revenue_grow_but/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/27/maine_workday_consultant_layoffs/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/14/workday_no_accountability_maine/
[9] https://blog.workday.com/en-us/2021/clarifying-amazon-workday-deployment.html
[10] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/saas&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YQF-E4S4iJ2ZVLZAlfADkQAAAMM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/saas&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YQF-E4S4iJ2ZVLZAlfADkQAAAMM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/saas&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YQF-E4S4iJ2ZVLZAlfADkQAAAMM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/31/maine_workday_dispute/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/14/workday_no_accountability_maine/
[15] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/saas&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YQF-E4S4iJ2ZVLZAlfADkQAAAMM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[16] https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/04/workday_problems_persist_at_mcgill/
[17] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Yes, it looks the system insisted people human resources drones couldn't work 24x7 and also there was something about strange features like "holidays".
It was a clear no-no in the Amazon system. So Amazon studied the system and understood how to remove those defects. It will soon release its Drone Management System, while lobbying the Congress to abolish the 13th amendment.
Human Capital Management
Is that an accounting way of changing staff costs from operating expenditure to capital expenditure?
I was going to empty the "Joke Alert" icon, but strangely I suspect I may be closer tot he mark than originally intended.
Re: Human Capital Management
Well, you do invest in your staff, seeking a return on that investment. Sounds like capital to me.
Sorry, who are we kidding. Invest in staff?
Nowt wrong with old stuff
“ accusing the vendor of showing "no accountability" for its part in a flawed project which could leave the state government continuing to rely on its 30-year-old mainframe-based system.”
I bet the maintenance fees are silly numbers though.
What will people do if workday goes bust or if Microsoft buys them and decides to shut it down 5 mins later as tech titans tend to do with once popular stuff like Nokia phones.
I wonder if the Bezos Boys will roll their own service now they've seen the competition's innards. It will be announced at Re:Invent with some quirky name and a completely unintelligible license model. Much like most of their products.
I loathe Workday
A period of job hunting has given me brutal experience of multiple recruitment and HR systems and uniformly they're all terrible.
Workday is however the one I've found the most obnoxious. It actively conspires to destroy your application, mangles your carefully crafted CV and invites you to enter the same information multiple times because of its own incompetence.
Most recruitment systems, SaaS or otherwise, do one of those but Workday appear to have refined it to an actual art, excelling in all of those areas, deterring you from actually working for any company that thinks it's a good advert for working there.
Of course, the recruitment module may not represent the core HCM functionality but with so many viable alternatives available, I wouldn't even bring them in for RFI to find out.
Amazon HR SaaS Solution
Not to worry Workday. AWS took it's time to analyze and reproduce your product with an AWS service offering that should be publicly available soon.
It's also funny that they are still using PeopleSoft given their obvious, public disclosure of how much they hate Oracle.
Human Capital Management
Wow! they've really lowered the bar there, making "Human Resources" almost cuddly by comparison, we're so close to just calling employees "interchangeable analogue components" or something